Is the name ‘African psychology’ not constraining? Of course the name ‘African psychology’ has real constraints. But remember that the term ‘African’ in African psychology is supposed to be silent.

The limitations of a term like ‘African psychology’ include how, more than a label like ‘US psychology’ or ‘South African psychology’, this term can burnish stereotypes of Africa as a special case. African psychology is not a special psychology. There is a very clear need to have something called ‘African psychology’. Sometimes. It is a psychology that seeks to speak in its own name. A psychology from a part of the world that has been historically excluded in thinking about the world. A part of the world that finds it ludicrous that hypotheses, explanations and tools of a psychology meant for Western Europeans or Americans dominate African countries. ‘Sometimes’ points to the fact that it is often necessary for those who do psychology on the peripheries of the world, particularly when they have to communicate with and orient those at the centres of the world of psychology, to retain labels like ‘African’, ‘Chinese’, or ‘Latin American psychology’. As such, the label ‘African psychology’ is usually retained for the sake of charting the entangled world that needs to be described, and pointing out to the powerful centre how realities out here, in this corner of the universe in which we live, are actually different from those at the centre.

The limitations of the label ‘African psychology’ are therefore very real, and not easily overcome. And, when they are overcome, they keep returning, even when we would like to be known simply as psychologists.